Bad Evolutionary Psychology: Attractiveness

His ridiculous research trying (and failing) to link “attractiveness” with reproductive strategies and reproductive success, and all sorts of vacuous claims regarding “attractiveness”. His statistics proved to be flawed and were many times criticised, which Kanazawa obviously ignored.

He also claimed that women are getting more “attractive” faster than men, which is absolutely ridiculous. Why it is so is obvious even to a non-specialist: males and females receive HALF their genes from BOTH male and female parent, thus any actual physical differences between males and females take an extremely long time to emerge. (More at Gene Expression).

Also, the question of “attractiveness” itself remains largely unresolved. Attractiveness is dependent on the cultural milieu, and has no absolute value. There’s nouniversally recognised definition of “attractiveness”. The method of judging the relative attractiveness of research subjects is very subjective, and, in the end, rather meaningless (also, see Jezebel – also for the links to the press coverage of the whole debacle).

Dr. Daniel Fincke has his PhD in philosophy from Fordham University and spent 11 years teaching in college classrooms. He wrote his dissertation on Ethics and the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. On Camels With Hammers, the careful philosophy blog he writes for a popular audience, Dan argues for atheism and develops a humanistic ethical theory he calls “Empowerment Ethics”. Dan also teaches affordable, non-matriculated, video-conferencing philosophy classes on ethics, Nietzsche, historical philosophy, and philosophy for atheists that anyone around the world can sign up for. (You can learn more about Dan’s online classes here.) Dan is an APPA (American Philosophical Practitioners Association) certified philosophical counselor who offers philosophical advice services to help people work through the philosophical aspects of their practical problems or to work out their views on philosophical issues. (You can read examples of Dan’s advice here.) Through his blogging, his online teaching, and his philosophical advice services each, Dan specializes in helping people who have recently left a religious tradition work out their constructive answers to questions of ethics, metaphysics, the meaning of life, etc. as part of their process of radical worldview change.